A local free dive champion will be seeking sunken treasure, specifically lost Incan gold, in “Treasure Quest: Snake Island,” a slithery-sounding six-part series premiering July 17 on Discovery.

Mehgan Heaney-Grier, expedition dive master, moved to Colorado from Florida and, ironically, got her ocean job here. She attended CU-Boulder and now lives in Lafayette.

Swimming with sharks, documenting alligators in their natural habitat, free diving… the biologist/conservationist/model is poised on camera and at ease with a crew of guys.

“I was brought on board for my dive expertise and my background in biology and anthropology,” Heaney-Grier said by phone. There’s a large dive component to the trip she said. “Back in late ’90s I established a dive record, I have a rich background with the ocean and diving. So it was the perfect storm of skill sets.”

The reality series filmed over three months combining adventure, danger with the snakes, jungle and treasure. “You can’t have one without the other. Snake Island is a very intense place. No joke. If you get bitten, the best that can happen is the body part will turn black and fall off.” It’s not as if helicopters are standing by, she said: “it would have been a very long boat ride back to the mainland, then an ambulance ride to get to a helicopter.”

Heaney-Grier came to Colorado in 2007 to attend CU after growing up in the Florida keys, “so I was no stranger to treasure-hunting culture.” She says she’s spent most of hery life on, in, or under water. Ironically, she says, “My husband is from Boulder, he loves the mountains. Silas, even his name means “man of the forest.”

She can’t give away secrets but, “I can say it was an epic adventure. we uncovered things we didn’t expect to find and learned a lot along the way about some of the folklore and history surrounding this treasure. It was really fascinating. There is a lot of historical fact involved, in a very exciting way.”

She currently works for Colorado Ocean Coalition, as leader of the ocean ambassadors program, focused on “marine conservation from a mile high. The message is, it’s all connected.”

Credit is due “9News unplugged,” the July 10 newscast by KUSA-Channel 9 that went off almost as usual despite the station being struck by lightning.

“It was all hands on deck,” according to news director Christy Moreno. The strike happened during 9:20 commercial break. “All you would have seen at home was a glitch” when lightning hit the tower. In the newsroom, monitors were flashing on and off randomly. “The switcher went out.”

Everyone in the control room realized it immediately, they couldn’t control anything. When it was clear no one was hurt, engineering, the IT staff, many whom of came back from home, newsroom managers, everybody started planning” how to get the newscast on the air.

“You use every resource, get really creative,” Moreno said. “Engineers are miracle workers.”
Immediately, anchors Adele Arakawa and Kyle Clark and their producers discussed what could be conveyed on iPad, using one microphone, one camera. Despite alarms going off and the fire department probing the building, “it was incredible teamwork.”

Like other stations, KUSA has a backup generator but the switcher is the control panel for the entire show. “Every bit of audio, video, graphics, everything comes through that. They were able to get just enough working, we got Danielle (Grant) back on 9:30, with (weather) maps and one microphone.”

Using one low-tech fixed camera in the newsroom, “by the time 10 p.m. came, they made some magic happen.”

“There’s not a good lightning plan,” Moreno said. “We have emergency plans in place, there are ways to work around, we could have used microwave if hadn’t been lightning…”

The Twitter commentary was lively: “A very different 9News at 10,” Moreno tweeted in the midst of the chaos.

Former staffer Will Ripley, now with CNN, chimed in: “I remember when the audio board caught fire a few years ago. 10p ratings were still great!”

Friday’s 10 p.m. numbers were slightly below average but at least the show got on the air.

The first American TV series produced entirely on location in Cuba naturally centers on Cuban car culture, the eye-catching beauties and beaters being lovingly restored, and the time warp that has existed due to the longstanding embargo. “Cuban Chrome,” a docuseries to be simulcast in English and Spanish on Discovery and Discovery en Español, premieres Monday at 8 p.m. locally on Discovery.

The producer Pilgrim Studios (“Fast ‘N Loud,” “Street Outlaws”) notes access was granted to produce “Cuban Chrome” prior to the United States announcing it would restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba. “Discovery and producer Pilgrim Studios got unprecedented access from both the Cuban and US governments to shoot in Cuba and production was underway long BEFORE the Obama administration announced last December it was restoring full diplomatic relations with Cuba.”

It’s a slick look at the car culture (including a 1934 Model A hot rod racing a 1956 Crown Victoria, and a mechanic talking about putting a boat motor in a car as part of the restoration). Every set of wheels has a story… There’s a bit of wider culture and history thrown in, but some viewers will crave more. For those of us itching to see the first food series, the first fashion series, the first music series produced entirely in Cuba, this is a tease.

Forrest Fenn sits in his home in Santa Fe, N.M. on Friday, March 22, 2013. For more than a decade, the 82-year-old claims he has packed and repacked a treasure chest, sprinkling in gold dust and adding hundreds of rare gold coins, gold nuggets and other artifacts, and buried it in the mountains somewhere north of Santa Fe. (AP Photo/Jeri Clausing)

This week’s “CBS Sunday Morning” includes a story about folks searching for treasure buried by Forrest Fenn, who buried a chest full of gold coins somewhere in the Rockies. Fenn wrote a poem with nine clues, placing the treasure somewhere in one of four states – Montana, Wyoming, Colorado or New Mexico. Barry Petersen talks with people searching for the treasure and with Fenn.

Forrest Fenn’s famously cryptic poem has had people digging up parts of the West for years. The line “Put in below the home of Brown,” perhaps a reference to Molly Brown, has drawn treasure hunters to Denver and Leadville over the years. Many have claimed to find the treasure but Fenn insists it’s still buried.

Fenn told the Associated Press in 2013 that his main goal was to get people, particularly children, away from their texting devices and looking for adventure outdoors.

Good TV producers are master manipulators, skilled at logistics, organization, timing and budgets. They are also experts at massaging psyches, motivating people to do their bidding, setting up and manipulating personalities. On reality TV shows, where emotion must be raw, over-the-top and combustible, producers must be especially good at persuading humans to reveal their worst sides and biggest secrets.

“UnReal” on Lifetime is one reality producer’s confessional, a smart scripted drama set backstage at a “Bachelor”-style show about what it took to be a good reality TV producer and how soul-killing a job it is. Starring Shiri Appleby (“Roswell”) and Constance Zimmer (“Entourage”), as the self-aware producer and her boss, “UnReal” is the pleasant surprise of summer 2015. It’s a particularly happy surprise, turning up as it has on Lifetime, a network best known for paint-by-numbers style dramas.

This week Lifetime announced “UnReal” will have a second season and, based on the countless editions and endless seasons of so-called reality TV dating shows on the air, creators Marti Noxon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro (“Sequin Raze,” from which “UnReal” is adapted) should have no trouble filling the hours with send-ups of all sorts of human depravity. More than a parody, the series gets into the motivations of the producers and the self-loathing of a young woman conscious of the spiritually bankrupt nature of her job. There’s outrageous humor in the satirical moments, serious drama in the human interactions beyond the dating show itself.

The United States celebrates with the World Cup Trophy after their 5-2 win over Japan in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Canada 2015 Final at BC Place Stadium on July 5, 2015 in Vancouver. (Rich Lam, Getty Images)

Final ratings prove the USA-Japan Women’s World Cup final Sunday night was the most watched soccer game in U.S. television history. The combined audience of Fox (25.4 million viewers) and Telemundo (1.27 million viewers) delivered a record-breaking audience of 26.7 million.

That tops the reported 26.5 million audience for the 2014 World Cup between Germany and Argentina which was carried by ABC and Univision.

Preliminary ratings showed the telecast was a ratings smash, scoring a 22 share in the metered markets (22 percent of homes watching were tuned to the game). Denver was among the top markets tuning in, according to trade reports.

How have Americans puckered up this long without her? And how has it taken “America’s Got Talent” 10 seasons to get around to her particular “talent”?

Joanna Kennedy of Boulder is a “passion and intimacy expert,” set to compete on “America’s Got Talent” on Tuesday (locally 7-9 p.m. on KUSA-Channel 9). She’s a kissing coach. For her audition, Kennedy is joined onstage by host Nick Cannon. And a plastic doll.

Kennedy, 47, runs Happiness, Love and Pleasure based in Boulder, dedicated to “tantric sacred sexuality consciousness.” She is a certified tantric educator and also an electrical engineer. “Life experience absolutely prompted me on this journey,” she said by phone from Boulder. She “grew up conservative in the Midwest,” trained in Hawaii at the Source School of Tantra, got a BA from the University of Michigan and MBA from the University of Houston. She moved to Boulder in 2004 “to do something more powerful with my life.”

She’s spent a decade in Boulder and recently moved her residence to Loveland. “I’ve taught a few thousand people over the years.”

She was invited to audition by an “AGT” producer, and while she’s aware her “talent” is ripe for joke fodder, she figured it was a great way to spread the word. “Did I know it’s a reality show? Absolutely. Did I know it’s a show that impacts millions of viewers? Abosolutely. Are men and women hungry for love and intimacy? Nobody teaches this stuff! My life’s work is to spread this word, and have some fun at the same time.”

Might a cynic say people have been kissing for millennia without benefit of a reality TV primer? “Yes, and some of the judges say that, too,” Kennedy said. Howard Stern was the most cynical judge. Her assessment of Nick Cannon after the audition: “Nick is definitely a confident kisser.”

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.